Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills’

The Belarusian Nobel laureate on the legacy of Chernobyl on its 30th anniversary, being an ‘unperson’ in her home country and writing non-fiction as literature

Svetlana Alexievich was at home in Minsk when the phone rang. For some years, she says, rumours had swirled that the Swedish Academy was considering her name. She had already received many honours. Still, it had been more than half a century since a non-fiction writer – Winston Churchill in 1953 – had won literature’s top award. The news from Stockholm was indeed stunning: Alexievich had won the 2015 Nobel prize in literature.

“This is such an important prize, such an enormous prize, you’d have to be a complete idiot to expect to win it,” she tells me. Over the next few hours the phone at her modest two-room flat in Belarus’s capital rang unceasingly. Callers included Mikhail Gorbachev, the French and German presidents, friends and well-wishers. Thousands of people wrote to her.

One person, though, “kept silent”. This was Belarus’s implacable dictator of 21 years, Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko faced a dilemma: the award was self-evidently a major honour for Belarus, and yet Alexievich was one of his most prominent critics. At home, officially at least, she was an unperson. Her books are unpublished, available only from Russia, or smuggled in via Lithuania in small underground editions. Her name is missing from school textbooks.

“It was election time. There were lots of international observers, so Lukashenko was forced to acknowledge the Nobel prize. He congratulated me that evening on TV,” Alexievich recounts. “Two days later, once the polls were over and everyone had gone home, he stated publicly that I decry the peoples of Russia and Belarus in my work.” She adds wryly: “Vladimir Putin didn’t congratulate me either.”

These snubs leave Alexievich unperturbed. They put her, she points out, in the great tradition of “Bunin, Brodsky and Pasternak”. All were Nobel laureates from the Russian-speaking literary world, rejected and rubbished by the Soviet leadership. “It’s customary,” she says, in laid-back tones. “The rhetoric from the state then was the same as now. These writers were all considered traitors, and said to serve the CIA and the Americans.”

Alexievich says she understands the “very aggressive” response from the post-Soviet Union’s twin strongmen. She has openly condemned the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, and describes it as “an occupation and war unleashed by Russia”. Belarus under Lukashenko, she says, has become a “small totalitarian reservation” inside Europe. Putin and Lukashenko are classic despots, with Ozymandian tendencies. “Both think they are some kind of messiah,” she observes.

I meet Alexievich in Berlin. She is spending several weeks in residence at the Literarisches Colloquium in the west of the city, on the peaceful shores of Lake Wannsee. We sit in a corner away from the window near a portrait of Franz Kafka. Alexievich has sensitive eyes; she dislikes too much light. She spent 12 years in exile in various western European cities – Paris, Berlin, Gothenburg – before returning four years ago to live in Belarus. “I want to live at home. You can only write at home,” she says.

By last October Alexievich was already famous, but the Nobel made her a global literary celebrity – something she admits can be trying. “You have to be in good physical and psychological health,” she says. The prize’s timing was perfect, she adds. It came at the end of five books and nearly 40 years of writing about what she calls red civilisation and red utopia: the Soviet Union at moments of fracture. She now wants “peace” and an opportunity to work on fresh projects.

Inevitably, the Nobel has fired new interest in her work. Next month, Alexievich visits the UK for the first time, aged 67. Her trip coincides with the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and a revised edition of Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer, first published in 1997, in an English translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. Her 2013 book Second-Hand Time, dealing with the break-up of the USSR and its aftermath, will also be published in May.

Like all of Alexievich’s works, Chernobyl Prayer is based on documentary interviews with eyewitnesses – in this case survivors of a cataclysm that saw 50m curies of radiation dumped into the atmosphere. They include rescue workers, helicopter pilots, Communist party bosses, scientists and villagers forcibly evacuated by the authorities from “the zone”, as it became known.

Seventy per cent of this radioactivity fell on Belarus. For a small country it was an unimaginable disaster. Its effects will last for tens of thousands of years – hence her subtitle, “A Chronicle of the Future”. Alexievich says the word “prayer” has a broad spiritual meaning in Russian and can be read as a plea. She calls Chernobyl an unprecedented event, with Belarusians thrust into the role of human guinea pigs or “black boxes”.

The book took Alexievich 11 years to write. It isn’t, she says, a work of journalism. Nor is it on Chernobyl as such but “on the world of Chernobyl”. She is interested in the twin aspects of her interviewees: the “Russian person” and “the eternal person”. “What I’m concerned with is what I would call the missing history,” she says, “the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.” Of her method she writes: “I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul.”

Alexievich arrived at Chernobyl immediately after the explosion, on 26 April 1986, brought down reactor number four. The plant was on fire, its orange glow visible for miles. “It was a crazy situation,” she says. She discovered a “traditional Soviet system” geared up for war and unable to react to what had happened. “There was chaos, military trucks, soldiers running around with Kalashnikovs saying: ‘What do I shoot?’. You can’t shoot physics, or at radiation.”

Bewilderment was universal. Alexievich says she watched one officer escorting an old lady to bury her basket of eggs in the ground, both with “wild-eyed faces”; peasants were entombing their own milk and bacon, and hosing down firewood and the roofs of their wooden homes. “You couldn’t see radiation with your eyes. You couldn’t smell it. It was intangible,” she says. “Humanity was unprepared for this.”

Born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, in modern-day Ukraine, Alexievich grew up in southern Belarus. Her parents’ village was “100-odd” kilometres away from Chernobyl. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian; for four generations her family were village schoolteachers. “My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody – simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing and beautiful women,” she says. I ask if her flair for happiness – it breathes through her work – comes from her childhood. “It’s the sum of our genes,” she says.

Chernobyl’s consequences were terrible: a rise in incidences of cancer, demographic decline, genetic mutation. Alexievich’s doctor sister fell ill in 1985 and died a few months after the disaster. “Were it not for Chernobyl she would have lived longer,” Alexievich says. The writer adopted her sister’s daughter, then four. She evacuated her parents. She found them a new apartment away from the zone; later her mother, now dead, got diabetes, went blind and had a stroke.

“Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills,” she says. “If you travel to villages where my parents lived, you find young women desperate to get married and have a baby. By 22 it’s too late for them. They all have operations leaving them infertile.”

Alexievich doesn’t include her personal tragedy in Chernobyl Prayer. Apart from a lyrical “self-interview” she is missing – a deliberate choice, she says. Her job as author is to give words to people “who are never heard”. She mentions an interview with Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose Chernobyl firefighter husband lies dying in a Moscow clinic. Doctors tell Ignatenko she can’t kiss and cuddle the man she loves because he is now “a contaminated object”. “It would be idiotic to insert myself,” she says.

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After leaving school, Alexievich worked as a newspaper reporter. She graduated from Belarus State University and in 1976 joined a literary and cultural magazine in Minsk, Neman, named after a river. Two years later she began work on what became her first critically acclaimed book, War’s Unwomanly Face.

In its preface, Alexievich describes searching for a genre that corresponded with the way she viewed and heard the world. The breakthrough came when she picked up a novel by Ales Adamovich, the Soviet Belarusian writer who fought with the partisans during the second world war and described the siege of Leningrad. Out of the Fire was based on “living voices”, familiar to Alexievich from her childhood and, as she puts it, the “home, the cafe, the bus”.

For War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of women who had fought with the Red Army between 1941-1945. Their testimony was previously unsought. Some were mere teenagers at the time; they had served at the front as snipers, drivers and pioneers. The book, published in 1985, sold 2m copies, and made Alexievich a Soviet household name.

Alexievich’s next project, Boys in Zinc, comprised interviews with soldiers from the doomed Soviet war in Afghanistan – as well as their widows and mothers. The title refers to the zinc coffins used to bring home those killed doing “their international duty”. It is a harrowing piece of work. Conscripts describe being duped into war; many were told they were going to Kazakhstan. Others naively volunteered. Those who survived, as one disillusioned major put it, became a “lost and unwanted generation”.

To research the book, Alexievich travelled to Soviet-occupied Kabul, meeting military advisers and nurses, some of them compelled to sleep with senior officers. She says that the politburo’s justification for war was similar to that used by Putin in 2014 to explain his illegal seizure of Crimea: that the Americans were about to deploy, and his invasion was a pre-emptive move against “fascism”. “I heard this from soldiers and officers [in Kabul]. They told me we’d beaten the US by two hours,” she says.

The Afghan war contributed to the USSR’s collapse. Alexievich says that she and other democrats – “romantics” – celebrated its demise. But they didn’t anticipate what happened next: gangster capitalism, a KGB takeover of politics and the impoverishment of a whole citizenry that had trusted Soviet power. She admits that today many Russians take comfort from Putin’s neo-Soviet ideas of a great, resurgent Russia encircled by western jackals. “Not in our wildest dreams in the 1990s did we imagine that the extremists, nationalist philosophers, ideologues and pseudo-patriots from the Orthodox church would become Putin’s counsellors.”

Is there, I wonder, hope that Russia and Belarus might one day reform? “It’s a long journey,” she replies. “You don’t step out of the gulag and then immediately become free”. She cites Varlam Shalamov, “my favourite great writer of the 20th century”, who spent 17 years in Stalin’s camps. “He said the system perverts the perpetrators and the victims. We now have a society where the two are mixed up.” Alexievich adds that another cold war with the west has started. She says she is afraid someone more evil than Putin might emerge and take Russia to “de facto fascism”.

After a career of meticulously recording horror, Alexievich says she can no longer face writing about conflict. “I’d find it impossible to go to a warzone. I’ve run out of reserves to protect myself from pain. I have grown tried of these atrocities,” she says. One can understand this. Second-Hand Time features terrible accounts of the inter-ethnic pogroms that accompanied the end of the USSR, in Tajikistan, Abkhazia and Baku, with murder, rape and neighbour v neighbour.

So what now? Alexievich says she is trying “something new”. She is currently writing two books: one is about love, in which men and women recount their personal stories of life and romance; the other is about growing old. “Civilisation has given us an extra 20-30 years of life. We’re rather unprepared for this. We don’t have a philosophy of later life, before our final disappearance into darkness,” she says.

One question Alexievich is asked frequently, sometimes with a whiff of condescension, is whether her books are really art? Typically they take her five to seven years to write. They include 300-500 “protagonists”, she says. Some she interviews once; others, who become “pillars” in her narrative, many times. Her methods are unchanging: she uses a dictaphone to record interviews. Afterwards, she transcribes them. What about an iPhone? “I’m not used to them,” she says.

Before Chernobyl’s nuclear accident 2,000 people lived in the village of Tulgovichi, which is inside ‘the zone’; now there are only eight. Photograph: Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images

Alexievich likens the next stage of the creative process to physical struggle – to fashioning a sculpture, or even to building a cathedral. Her books, she says, are “novels of voices”, adding that writing in this genre is “very tough”. “It’s non-fiction done by the laws of literature. Russia has this tradition. Rodin was once asked: ‘How do you make your sculptures?’ He answered: ‘I wrestle with stone.’ It’s the same with me. I wrestle with time. I take the waste that life leaves behind. I start cleansing it. I make art out of it.”

The Swedish Academy cited Alexievich for her “polyphonic writings, monuments to suffering and courage in our time”. Why, I wonder, doesn’t non-fiction win the Nobel more often? Alexievich praises the academy for its far-sightedness and says that we live in a fast-changing reality. There are new artistic forms. “Nobody now would question that installations are art. Why shouldn’t literature change? The boundary between non-fiction and fiction is blurring.” Her conversations “go deeper” than mere reporting, she says: they are the best method of capturing our protean modern selves.

One senses that Alexievich is contented. The last page in Second-Hand Time is titled “Notes from an Everywoman”. It is a monologue by a 60-year-old woman, whose husband has drunk himself to death. She lives alone, 1,000km from Moscow, is indifferent to politics and to “who’s red and who’s white”, and cares only for planting potatoes and making it to spring. “It’ll be too bad when it comes time to die,” she says. In the meantime she goes out at night. She looks at the lilacs. “They glow … Here, let me cut you a bouquet.”

Is Alexievich happy, I wonder? She smiles and replies: “I have a daughter and a granddaughter. She is 10. She calls me Sveta. We are good friends.”

Alexievich has to go. Before she departs I ask her what she might say to Lukashenko, were they ever to meet? “I would tell him we have to look to Europe. He has to give freedom to society. Otherwise we’re doomed.” She is too much of a pragmatist to imagine her request would ever be acted on. “Of course, he won’t agree because he’s a dictator. That would mean he’d have to resign. Dictators never go of their own accord.”